


Dragons and Snowstorms

by PostcardsfromTheoryland



Series: December Fic Prompts [7]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Blizzards & Snowstorms, Gen, Hypothermia, Keith is not having a good day, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-09
Updated: 2020-12-09
Packaged: 2021-03-09 21:20:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,103
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27972971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PostcardsfromTheoryland/pseuds/PostcardsfromTheoryland
Summary: Keith is trying to think positively about this whole thing. It’s cold enough that the injuries are all completely numb, so at least he isn’t in a lot of pain. And he’s still shivering, which means that his body still recognizes that it’s cold, even if the shaking can’t generate enough heat to do anything about it.That’s…all the positives he can come up with right now.
Series: December Fic Prompts [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2037385
Comments: 9
Kudos: 44





	Dragons and Snowstorms

**Author's Note:**

> I realize this has nothing to do with holidays but I couldn't resist a hypothermia fic.

Keith has been in worse situations than this. It will be fine. He just needs to think positively. Patience yields focus, after all.

So, positives. It’s cold enough that the injuries are all completely numb, so at least he isn’t in a lot of pain. And he’s still shivering, which means that his body still recognizes that it’s cold, even if the shaking can’t generate enough heat to do anything about it.

That’s…all the positives Keith can come up with right now.

What he wouldn’t give to have Red here right now, have her just blast him in the face with a heat ray and then crawl into the cockpit, where it’s warm and there isn’t any snow or wind and he can just pass out on the floor while she takes him off this hellhole planet. But Red isn’t here – she’s lightyears away, safely ensconced in the Castle.

Keith had gone with Shiro in the Black Lion on the last distress call, and on their way back to meet up with the others the Shokashte had called, needing urgent help fighting some creature they’d ironically called a ‘koala.’ Originally both Keith and Shiro were going to take care of it, but then there was a bigger, more urgent, Voltron Lion-based distress call, and Keith had foolishly told Shiro just to drop him off on the planet and let him take care of the koala problem while Shiro met up with the others on Dunbarreo. Shiro had hesitated, saying he didn’t feel right leaving Keith to deal with it on his own, but no, Keith had wanted to prove that he could handle it.

Stupid decision, in retrospect. The ‘koala’ had been more along the lines of a dragon, only it had ten legs and a lot of claws and very sharp teeth. It didn’t breathe fire, though honestly that might have improved things considering how cold it is on Kashte. Keith had killed the thing, in the end, but not before it had bitten down onto one of his legs and swung him, hard, headfirst into a cliff. The impact had messed up most of his armor’s systems: the comms are down, as are navigation, thermoregulation, and probably a dozen other important things. The potential blood loss would be a bigger concern if it wasn’t freezing outside; there’s the wound to his leg and several other gashes on his stomach and back that made it through the black undersuit and have completely compromised any protection from the cold.

So he’d been beat to shit, but he’d accomplished what he came here to do. It wouldn’t be so bad, he figured. The Shokashte leaders who had brought him as close to the koala’s location as they dared had first aid and communications, so Keith thought the worst thing he’d have to deal with was the “I told you so” lecture from Shiro when Keith called him, looking like an extra from a disaster movie.

Except Keith had gotten turned around during the fighting, and by the time he realized he’d gone the wrong way to get back to their makeshift camp, it was too late, and he was already hopelessly lost.

The Shokashte are tall and thin, fuzzy, with little star-shaped noses and they kind of remind him of mole people. Which is fitting, since all of their permanent dwellings are deep underground where they could conserve heat on a planet that’s deadly cold 95% of the year. It’s an ingenuous system, unless you’re an idiot Paladin of Voltron who gets lost and then has no buildings to use as landmarks.

He’d spent the first half hour trying to retrace his steps back to where he knew the koala’s carcass should have been, but he couldn’t even manage that. He suspected he was limping too badly to manage walking in a straight line, but trying to correct for that didn’t help matters.

The next half hour he’d huddled down in a small copse of the weird, thick but short trees that seemed to have taken over this part of the planet, hoping that they would at least provide enough protection from the wind that he could try to repair the comms. But it was a no on both fronts – he’d just ended up colder and stiffer and more frustrated.

And that was before it got dark and started snowing in earnest, giant clumping flakes completely whiting out Keith’s vision of anything around him, much less something he can use as a shelter. He doesn’t know exactly when the rest of the Paladins will make it back here to pick him up, but he suspects it’s going to be too late.

It’s been hours now. How many hours, Keith isn’t entirely sure, but it just keeps getting colder and stormier and Keith’s window of survival is closing fast. He has to keep walking, to try to generate heat if nothing else, but he’s completely lost all sense of direction. That whole “if you get lost, stay in one place and wait for someone to find you” thing doesn’t work so well if staying in one place is going to end with you completely turned into a popsicle.

For a while now, he’s been following a strange pattern of lights he can just barely make out through the storm. When he’d first noticed them, he’d been positive that they were just hallucinations, weird multi-colored sparks on the edges of his vision. But they hadn’t gone away and had only seemed to get brighter when he followed them. He’s pretty sure it’s a nebula; he remembers passing a similarly colored, pulsing celestial body when Shiro dropped him off. But it’s not as if he has anything better to aim toward.

There’s a sound, too, almost like a low-pitched siren, that might be getting louder. He really hopes that’s not some kind of alien dragon mating call thing, but really that would be just his luck at this point.

Before Keith can worry more about potential dragon attacks, he slips on some black ice and lands _hard_ on his bad leg and ends up just sprawled in a snowbank. He needs to get up and keep moving but God, he’s so tired. He’s starting to feel less cold, now, too. And he knows, _he knows_ that’s a bad thing, but there’s still a relief in feeling the slightest bit warmer.

He does eventually manage to drag himself upright, though he wonders the entire time what the point is. The nebula lights are the only reason he knows he isn’t going in circles, but he has no idea how they’re going to help him. The only chance he has is to hope that the Shokashte thought the lights were as intriguing as Keith does and built a town or at least some kind of civilization near them, but the odds of that happening probably aren’t great.

But. The lights might be getting bigger, maybe. Definitely brighter. And the sound is getting louder, more like a bunch of eerie flutes now than a siren.

He gets to the bottom of a steep hill that feels insurmountable in his current condition, but the lights seem almost tauntingly close. There’s a part of him that’s afraid that if he tries to go around the hill instead of climbing it, he’ll lose track of the lights altogether, and for some reason that concerns him more than the hypothermia. So he forces himself to climb, resorting to crawling on his hands and knees and grabbing for anything more stable than powdery snow. It’s complete agony, and he’s growling with frustration before he’s even halfway there, but it all turns out to be worth it when he crests the top of the hill.

The lights aren’t from that nebula at all. They’re little sparks rising high into the air from the towering bonfire in front of him.

The fire itself is a dark maroon-ish color and it’s barely giving off any light other than the sparks, but it _is_ giving off heat. Keith can feel it from a hundred feet away. He has no idea what it’s doing here, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, but at the moment he really doesn’t care. It’s warm, almost painfully so, and he staggers forward until his legs give out on him and dump him onto the ground, close enough that he's nearly sitting in the fire.

The flames are odd, even considering he's in space; it doesn’t look like the fire is actually burning any fuel source. Maybe there’s some kind of natural gas source underneath? The sound is more obvious now, too: he can see a large metallic tube in the faint light from the flames, with holes for the wind to pass through and produce that eerie call he’s been following. This all seems intentional, like it was put here on purpose, but Keith is too tired to work out the details. There’s no shelter here from the wind or the snow or possible attacks, but as long as the fire keeps going he should at least manage to survive the night. Maybe the storm will have passed by morning and he can figure out how to get back to civilization.

“Paladin!” The voice startles Keith out of his half-doze and he looks up to see a Shokashte woman wrapped in heavy furs and hurrying toward him. She covers him with a thick blanket and then starts tugging at his arms, trying to get him upright, but Keith is _done_.

He passes out.

* * *

When Keith wakes, it’s to a warm bed and nearby voices. His armor has all been removed and his whole body feels shaky and stiff, and now that he’s warmer the wound to his leg is really starting to hurt, but that’s Shiro’s voice, speaking in low tones, and Lance answering in not-so-low-tones, and a third voice that sounds vaguely familiar. Keith tries to sit up but all the pain sort of flares at the movement, and he must make a noise because Shiro is suddenly next to him, pushing him back into bed with ease.

“The next time you want to go off on a solo distress call, remind me to say no.”

Lance snorts at them from across the room. “I can’t believe you got beaten up by a koala.”

“The koala was a fierce, loathsome creature that plagued us for far too long,” the Shokashte woman says in reproach. “That the Red Paladin defeated it on his own is a testament to his fortitude.”

“Still a koala,” Lance shrugs.

“Why are you here,” Keith manages to grumble. Now that he knows he’s not going to freeze to death, he mostly wants to just go back to sleep. Shiro can stay but Lance is just being annoying for the principle of the thing at this point.

Shiro gestures to the Shokashte woman behind him. “Jola contacted us when she found you at the Waypoint, but the weather was still pretty bad when we got here. The Blue Lion is best in the cold, so Lance and I went down to make sure you were alright. Don’t let him fool you, he was fretting and panicking an hour ago.”

“Waypoint?” Keith asks. On top of everything, his throat feels like shit, so he’s grateful when Shiro puts a warm cup of some kind of tea into his hands and helps him sit up enough to drink it.

“The fire above ground,” Jola says. “It’s a remnant from before we moved into the caves and tunnels, the center of one of the old cities. There are many throughout the planet, and those of us who tend them are the Wayfarers. We maintain the flames and the chimes and keep watch for any travelers. Commander Peyo contacted me when you didn’t return to the camp, so we were hopeful that you would make your way here.”

“It’s kind of like a lighthouse,” Lance says. “Only, I guess, in reverse, because you’re supposed to stay away from lighthouses but go toward sparkly life-saving fires.”

“We’re grounded for a while,” Shiro says, taking the empty cup out of Keith’s hands and then brushing his fingers through Keith’s hair. “The storm is even worse now, and we want to wait until you’re a bit warmer before we head back. Why don’t you get some more rest?”

“Mmkay.” Don’t need to tell Keith twice.

“And I mean it. I don’t care if aliens want us to go pick flowers, we’re not doing solo distress calls anymore. At least not without one of the Lions.”

“Agreed.”


End file.
